]]>By: AtticusSnarkhttp://pando.com/2014/01/29/erik-wemple-dreams-of-pierre-omidyar-lucky-pierre/#comment-77642
Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:57:42 +0000http://pando.com/?p=124896#comment-77642The last many years there has generally been a ‘deal’. Newspapers would be mostly centrist and report without too much bias and people would buy those newspapers. Newspapers would sell ads, and the whole thing hummed along. Chomsky, of course, said the US govt. controlled the press, but he never spent time at a newspaper to realize it’s mainly the auto and appliance dealers who wield the true power. Critique local and national politics all one wants, but don’t make fun of the latest model 4-door or pick on Maytag.

From this age, newspapers grew large and fat. Many markets had 2 or even more dailies so you got the whole story. Each paper would have the editorial page, giving room to all manner of people, from the far left to the far right. And for the most part it worked. Not perfectly, but that gave good margins to the alternative press too.

But that was the deal. Give the people relatively unbiased news and we’ll give you a very nice income. Try not to bullshit us too much and we won’t drop our subscriptions.

Letters to the paper were vetted. The ones from lunatics (schitzophrenics tend to doodle odd stuff in the margins for example) were relegated to the garbage, and good discussions were had. Not like the situation today where Drudge links to a story and it’s like someone dumped a tanker full of retards onto the comments section.

That era is done. The internet has eaten the newspaper and is slowly digesting the industry as a whole. A good, union backed, job as a journalist is harder to come by. Now it’s link baiting, catchy headline writing and realization most people don’t read 60% through the article on the page. The money in news isn’t there and longform isn’t making big bucks.
That being said, and I’m sorry for being so long winded. We’re in a new age. An age were an opinion writer can call himself a journalist. Where a news organization can be set up to spread propaganda without concern as to cost.
That’s my fear with Omidyar’s adventure. It will be a Huffington post, but with the main focus being a strong anti-government message. A 250 million dollar bullhorn for a hysterical hypocrite in Brazil to pontificate daily to susceptible people to goad them into ‘leaking’ stuff. What stuff? Who knows? Who cares? Just leak, secrecy is bad apparently. Who cares what could happen to your country, just leak to help move along some Libertarian wet dream where we all end up bottoms to unrestrained capitalism when the state is minimized.

This isn’t news, it’s a propaganda arm for an ideology.

All I know is the age of moderation seems gone, and the age of the echo chamber is upon us. Greenwald knows how to play the internet. He’s done so over the last many months like a champion. Catchy, misleading, headlines. Outrageous buffoonery that doesn’t seem to pan out when further investigated, and sweeping pronunciations about the wickedness of America.